I am currently reading a book that I highly recommend. It's entitled Missional Map - Making "Skills for Leading in Times of Transition" written by Alan Roxburgh.
This book helps give language to the vague sense of dislocation and anxiety many people feel in today's constantly changing world. The author claims, and I agree, we are facing a massive cultural shift and transition similar to the dramatic changes in the 4th and 17th centuries. Many authors have already described this change as a "world view" shift from the modern age to post-modernism.
This has great implications for the church and its mission. Here are some quotes I'd like to share with you and let you add your comments or questions. I am not quite done with the book, but I need to process what I have read so far.
The author's premise is simple: The old maps no longer help us navigate effectively into this changing environment. Most churches simply use new versions of the old maps and get frustrated because their efforts don't seem to make a difference to people "outside" the traditional church. What we need to help us reach new people in this fluid society are new maps.
Here are some words from the book:
If we have crossed such a threshold into a new space, what are the maps that will enable us to navigate this other world into which we have been brought? What does it look like to form God's people in a place where the maps that once guided us so well no longer help us make sense of the terrritory in which we find ourselves?
By the late 1980s, it had become clear to me that the environment in which the church functioned had changed; it was like a weather pattern that had held for a very long time suddenly being swept away by winds off the lake; we were in a new atmosphere. The simplest way I could describe that transformation was to say that all our attention to the internal variables (vital worship, small groups, fellowship, leadership, evangelism etc.) of church life no longer helped us understand and engage this changed context. That didn't mean they were unimportant; it meant they no longer correlated or connected to what was happening in the lives of the people of the neighborhoods and communities in which we live.
I started to realize I needed a different imagination for what it means to be a church in a community and what it means to lead in such a church. One of the things this growing realization meant was that it would be possible to be a faithful community of God's people only by reengaging the neighborhoods and communities where we live and learning to ask what was happening among the people of the neighborhood, attending to their stories and cultivating receptiveness to being surprised by what God might already be up to among all these people who aren't thinking about church or even God. How would I do that?
It seems to me that Alan Roxburgh is very concerned that "good church folk" really don't know what hit them. Many of us have not accepted the fact the world we live in needs new maps if we are going to connect with the next generations of potential Christ followers.
What will those maps look like? What goals and strategies will further the Kingdom in this time of transition?
It seems to me that we are entering a time of listening and reengaging our local communities to better understand and serve them with the love of Christ.
"Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved."
- Matthew 9:17
Please add your comments or questions for discussion.
Bob
